Local officials across Texas have heard the message loud and clear, and they’re watching warily to see just how harshly lawmakers might punish them under a proposed law that would ban sanctuary policies like Travis County’s. Under the bill the Senate approved last month, officials like Hernandez would face steep fines, lawsuits and potentially jail time.

The House has yet to reveal its plan to prevent sanctuary laws, but local officials are hoping the lower chamber takes a more measured approach that doesn’t encroach so deeply on local discretion.

"There used to be discretion on how to handle public safety, " said Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt. "Now, if you don't do it the way the Legislature wants you to, there are penalties that are very, very high."

Supporters of the sanctuary city ban, which Abbott declared a legislative emergency in January, say local law enforcement agencies should enforce federal immigration laws. They worry that unauthorized immigrants who are released from jail instead of being turned over to immigration officials could go on to commit more serious crimes.

But local officials who oppose the ban say the measure would erode trust in law enforcement officials in immigrant communities, making their cities and counties less safe.

They see the Senate’s enforcement measures as an effort by state lawmakers to crack down on local entities whose policies and politics they dislike.

The ban would charge local officials who do not comply with federal immigration enforcement with a crime, cut state funding for the local entities they oversee and assess financial penalties against those cities or counties.

The entity would be fined $1,000 for its first violation and $25,000 for each day the violation continued.

Jennifer Laurin, a law professor at the University of Texas, said charging local government officials with a crime for not complying with federal immigration enforcement goes further than the Legislature ever has before in attempting to force local governments to comply with state mandates.

Local police, she said, have long had discretion to enforce laws in their jurisdiction. The bill, she said, criminalizes that discretion.

"It's significant to say, 'When you opt not to do something, we're going to treat that as a crime,' " she said.

Local officials are also wary of provisions in the bill that allow crime victims to sue cities or counties for a crime committed by a person who wasn’t turned over to immigration authorities. Those victims could sue for up to 10 years after an immigrant was released by a local entity — a time period some say is unreasonably long.

Cary Roberts, a spokesman for the Texas Association of Counties, said that opens them up to “unknowable” amounts of liability.

“It’s intended to be punitive and to that extent, it’s message received,” he said.

Some county leaders also worry that the legislation puts them in a legal bind that could make them subject to either losing state funds or defending themselves against expensive inmate lawsuits.

The Senate bill requires jails to turn over to federal immigration officials anyone who has an immigration detainer, a document that asks local officials to alert federal authorities if that person comes into their custody. If the jail released an unauthorized immigrant with a detainer who posted bond or otherwise resolved their criminal case, the county could be penalized by the state.

But, if the immigrant was not released, the inmate could sue the jail for violating the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from detention without probable cause.

The bill “forces a county or local law enforcement agency to err [either] on the side of acting outside constitutional bounds or what might become state law,” said Elissa Steglich, a law professor at the University of Texas. “Neither is a good place to be.”

Political pressureThe Senate bill would also allow people to file complaints with the attorney general if they believe a local entity failed to comply with immigration laws. If that claim was verified, the local official in charge of the entity could be charged with a Class A misdemeanor and could be jailed for up to a year.

While that provision falls short of Abbott’s call to remove elected officials who oversee sanctuary policies, the message to local officials is clear. Sen. Charles Perry, who authored the Senate bill, has said he hopes local voters will kick out of office officials who promote such policies.

Eckhardt said leaders in Travis County are already feeling political pressure after the governor’s office pulled funding from county programs in February.

Abbott came after Hernandez when she announced in January that she would limit cooperation with immigration authorities, turning over only those charged with capital murder, aggravated assault and human trafficking.

Since then, Abbott has pulled $1.5 million in grants from Travis County that were used to fund local programs, including ones that helped rehabilitate veterans and curb prostitution.

In response to political pressure, Hernandez has expanded the offenses under which she will comply with requests to hold unauthorized immigrants in the jail.

Abbott, Perry and other supporters of the ban have said that cities and counties can easily avoid the penalties they’ve proposed. All they have to do is turn over undocumented immigrants to federal officials when there’s a detainer and ensure that their policies don’t prevent local police from asking people they stop about their immigration status.

It’s not lawmakers who are inflicting the penalties, they contend, but the local officials who refuse to comply with federal immigration requests bring the trouble on themselves.

Perry has said his bill is simply meant to ensure public safety.

“The state has clearly identified the consequence as to what will happen when a jurisdiction decides to take the law into their own hands,” he said. “There will be consequences.”

House responseIt is unclear what changes, if any, lawmakers in the Texas House will make to the bill.

In 2015, the measure passed in the Senate but failed in the House, where it faces more resistance from both Democrats and some Republicans.

Rep. Charlie Geren, a Republican from Fort Worth who has filed one of several sanctuary cities bills in the House, said in February he was still not sure if his version would include the same civil and criminal penalties the Senate has approved. He said this week he was still working on his bill and had no comment for this story.

While local officials will be watching in hopes that the House’s proposal is less harsh, the political pressure the bill aims to create is not lost, said Jim Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas.

"It's a hardball use of incentives,” Henson said. “This is as old as the carrot and the stick."